Offender and Victim Networks in Human Trafficking

Ella Cockbain

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781138644823
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317241430
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

Millions of pounds are spent every year trying to tackle human trafficking, modern slavery and child sexual exploitation. These are apparently threats perpetrated by 'criminal masterminds', spreading at a dizzying rate and approaching epidemic proportions – or so the story goes. Amid all the bold rhetoric and sweeping claims, there is very little robust research to help understand these problems and inform evidence-based policy and practice.

In this book, readers are invited to delve inside the murky world of human trafficking. It focuses on the internal (domestic) trafficking of children for sexual exploitation. It is based on far-reaching analysis of six of the earliest and largest such investigations in the United Kingdom (UK), including the infamous Derby and Rochdale cases that sparked nationwide concerns about 'street grooming' and 'Asian sex gangs'. Innovative methods, analytical rigour and truly extraordinary data underpin the research: a nuanced and sometimes unsettling exploration of the offender and victim networks, their characteristics, structure, activity and dynamics and the problems they pose for investigation and prosecution. The results paint a picture of a sprawling and dynamic system of grooming and abuse that is deeply embedded in complex webs of social relations and interactions.

This book challenges accepted wisdom, debunks myths and introduces new and fundamentally different ways of thinking about trafficking and its prevention. An accessible and compelling read, this book is for academics, policymakers, practitioners and others interested in serious and organised crime.

Chapter 1

Introduction

A different kind of trafficking

‘Asian sex gangs’: a new trafficking threat?

Revealed: conspiracy of silence on UK sex gangs.

(The Times, 2011)

Jail for ‘sexual predators’ who led Asian gang that abused girls as young as 12 in ‘reign of terror’.

(Daily Mail, 2011)

Child sex trafficking in the UK on the rise with even younger victims targeted.

(Guardian, 2011)

In January 2011, a ‘new’ form of sex trafficking shot to the forefront of media, political and public debate in the UK. The catalyst was The Times newspaper’s front-page exposé claiming to have uncovered a new crime threat (The Times, 2011). Dubbed ‘on-street grooming’, this menace was characterised as the systematic recruitment, grooming, movement and sexual exploitation of young white British girls by gangs of Asian¹ men. The authorities were accused of wilfully ignoring the issue – even deliberately covering it up – for fear of appearing racist. Unsurprisingly, the claims proved explosive despite their questionable empirical and analytical foundations (Cockbain, 2013). As one commentator noted, ‘[t]here could, of course, hardly be a more emotive story than this. Sexual abuse! White girls! Pakistani men! Politically-correct establishment letting it happen!’ (Telegraph, 2011).

No doubt contributing to its impact, the exposé in The Times coincided with the sentencing of Abid Saddique and Mohammed Liaqat. They were reportedly the ringleaders group, accused of bringing sexual terror to the city of Derby and surrounding areas. They and nine other men stood trial in 2010 on over 70 counts in total, mostly serious sexual offences such as rape, sexual activity with a child and child prostitution and child pornography offences. A prolific sexual offender and obvious villain figure who infamously nicknamed his car ‘the Rape Rover’, Saddique embodied the emergent folk devil of the ‘Asian sex gang predator’ (Mail on Sunday, 2011).

The sentencing of Saddique and Liaqat marked the culmination of Derbyshire Constabulary’s Operation Retriever: a human trafficking investigation with a difference. Trafficking is generally associated with foreign victims and international movements. In contrast, Operation Retriever focused on a then relatively unknown form of trafficking: the movement of British children within the UK for sexual exploitation. This phenomenon is known as ‘internal child sex trafficking’ or ‘domestic minor sex trafficking’. Operation Retriever was one of the earliest and largest investigations into internal child sex trafficking in the UK. It is also one of the six major cases on which the groundbreaking new research in this book is based.

The headlines at the start of this chapter encapsulate some of the most central and enduring themes in the debate around internal child sex trafficking in the UK. By sketching out key such themes here, I highlight emergent myths and misconceptions around this phenomenon. Through the unique empirical research presented in this book, I critically examine the structure, nature and dynamics of internal child sex trafficking networks and the challenges they pose for interventions. I show that these familiar but flawed tropes simply do not withstand empirical scrutiny. I argue instead that internal child sex trafficking is a complex and socially embedded phenomenon that requires more nuanced explanations and interventions.

Myth 1 Only evil and deeply committed sexual predators engage in this crime

In media and political debate, offenders were typically characterised as truly deviant sexual predators. This portrayal is clearly reminiscent of the way child sexual abuse in general is often framed as a ‘unique, inexplicable phenomenon’ (Wortley and Smallbone, 2012, p. 46). It reflects the popular misconception that only extraordinary people could possibly commit abhorrent acts (Zimbardo, 2007). Attributing offenders’ misdeeds to some inherently ‘evil’ and uniquely ‘criminal’ disposition or to a medical pathology like paedophilia helps to cast offenders as a deviant ‘out group’ and thus comfort and reassure ‘normal’ people.

Myth 2 This crime is an attack on white Britain

Many commentators implicitly or explicitly framed this crime as an attack by hostile outsiders on the white British mainstream, its culture and values. The involvement both of white offenders and of black and minority ethnicity victims was routinely downplayed amid the insistence Asian men were deliberately singling out white British girls for abuse (Cockbain, 2013). Epitomising the racialisation of the narrative, one liberal tabloid re-released an article originally entitled ‘Nine quizzed over child grooming’ several days later under the new headline ‘Nine Asian men quizzed over alleged grooming of white girls for sex’ (Mirror, 2011). Casting the issue as a ‘conspiracy of silence’ (The Times, 2011) and accusing the authorities of failing to act out due to misplaced political correctness and fears of being branded racist helped stifle debate around the validity of the racial framing: challenges to such claims could readily be – and indeed were – rebutted as yet more evidence of a cover-up (Cockbain, 2013). There is a long history of racialised crime reporting and many parallels can be drawn here. One example is the archetypal moral panic around mugging in 1970s Britain, which was framed as a threat from young black men to elderly white women (Gutzmore, 1983; Hall et al., 1978). More recently, there was panic in Australia after a series of rapes involving groups of Lebanese heritage offenders against victims who were widely misrepresented as white Australians (Gleeson, 2004; Warner, 2004).

Myth 3: Offenders are criminal masterminds

The offenders were portrayed as skilled and sophisticated operators who carefully selected and masterfully manipulated their victims. Internal child sex trafficking has been dubbed ‘the most sophisticated … form of child sexual exploitation’ (Barnardo’s, 2011, p. 4; 2012). More generally, human traffickers are often portrayed in advocacy, government and even academic publications as master manipulators and skilled operators of sophisticated, organised and highly lucrative criminal enterprises (e.g. Erder and Kaska, 2003; Morrison and Crosland, 2000; Reid, 2010; Shelley, 2007; Smartt, 2003; US Department of State, 2004). A classic example is the United States (US) Government’s ill-substantiated but nonetheless oft repeated claim that trafficking ‘is increasingly perpetrated by organized, sophisticated criminal enterprises. Such trafficking is the fastest growing source of profits for organized criminal enterprises worldwide’ (US Department of State, 2000).

Myth 4: Victims are mere pawns

Depictions of the victims tended to focus heavily on their youth and vulnerability. Their agency and choices were overlooked in portrayals that cast them as passive playthings manipulated in offenders’ games. Such one-dimensional portrayals that objectify victims are a known problem in the human trafficking literature (Andrees and van der Linden, 2005; O’Connell Davidson, 2015). The imposed passivity aside, media accounts of the internal child sex trafficking victims were refreshing in their sympathetic stance to victims despite how much they diverged from the ‘ideal victim’ stereotype (Christie, 1986). The victims’ characteristics and lifestyles made them ill-suited to the standard child sexual abuse cliché of ‘innocent defiled’ (Ost, 2009) and they were rarely shoehorned into it. Yet they were neither dismissed as unworthy victims nor blamed for their own abuse. This situation is surprising in light of well-documented tendencies towards victim blaming in the reporting of sexual offences (Moore, 2009) and the way child sexual exploitation victims have previously been dismissed as ‘streetwise’ children and consensual child prostitutes (Barrett and Melrose, 2003; Chase and Statham, 2005).

Myth 5: This is a crime only perpetrated by men against girls

The narrative was framed in highly gendered terms, with subsequent debate focusing near exclusively on the threats posed by male offenders to female victims. Other configurations, including female offenders and male victims, went virtually unmentioned. A highly gendered victim narrative in particular is typical of discussions around both human trafficking and child sexual exploitation, although interest in and empirical research on male victims is slowly growing (e.g. Cockbain et al., 2015; Cockbain and Brayley-Morris, 2017; Surtees, 2008).

Myth 6: This is a crime epidemic

Internal child sex trafficking – or ‘on-street grooming’ – was depicted as a threat of near-epidemic proportions. The original exposé spoke emotively of a ‘plague on northern towns’ and a ‘tidal wave of offending’ (The Times, 2011). The statistical evidence cited to support such claims was unconvincing: as serious as the offences in question were, the 17 cases identified hardly constitute an epidemic threat (Cockbain, 2013). In addition, the process by which the cases were identified and the inclusion parameters were neither particularly clear nor robust. The approach implied there was a specific offence of ‘grooming’ used to identify relevant cases: in fact, no such offence exists. Despite its shaky foundations, The Times’ claim that 50 of the 56 men convicted of on-street grooming were Asian was widely repeated and rarely scrutinised. A lack of robust and accurate data on the scope of the problem and the uncritical repetition of dubious statistics are both characteristic of the human trafficking field more broadly (e.g. Aronowitz, 2009; Cockbain et al., 2018a; Goodey, 2008). So too are largely unsubstantiated claims that human trafficking is a rapidly growing problem or one of epidemic proportions.

Human trafficking: definitions and distinctions

Human trafficking is not a new phenomenon. It roots date back to both the transatlantic slave trade and the so-called ‘white slave trade’ (Doezema, 1999). The late 1990s brought renewed interest in human trafficking – or ‘modern slavery’ – and a dramatic growth in associated policymaking, legislative and research activity (Laczko, 2005). After a period marked by a lack of consensus around what constituted human trafficking (Aronowitz, 2001), a standard definition was adopted in the United Nations ‘Palermo Protocol’ (United Nations, 2000b). This definition forms the basis of most national legislation (Lehti and Aromaa, 2006), including counter-trafficking law in the UK’s constituent nations. According to the Palermo Protocol, human trafficking involves:

The recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of persons, by means of threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control over another person, for the purpose of exploitation.

(United Nations, 2000b, p. 5)

Trafficking is said to involve three necessary elements: an ‘act’ (e.g. recruitment) committed by a ‘means’ (e.g. deception) for a ‘purpose’ (e.g. sexual exploitation). Children are a special case since the act and purpose alone suffice for them to be considered trafficked: the implicit assumption here is that the means element is irrelevant since children cannot give informed consent.

Another important distinction is between international and internal (domestic) trafficking: the former involves trafficking between countries, whereas the latter occurs within the borders of a single country. Although the Palermo Protocol was a supplement to the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organised Crime (2000a), it explicitly covers internal as well as international trafficking. In practice, internal trafficking has long been overshadowed in policy and practice by its better known and better understood international counterpart (Aronowitz et al., 2010; Laczko and Gozdziak, 2005; Winterdyk and Reichel, 2010). Despite the expectations of the Palermo Protocol, many countries have legislated only against international trafficking. A 2009 study found, for example, that only seven of the European signatories had introduced laws explicitly criminalising internal trafficking (European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, 2009). The vast majority of research to date has focused on international trafficking, leaving internal trafficking’s ‘unique characteristics and challenges’ particularly poorly understood (Aronowitz et al., 2010; Brayley and Cockbain, 2014; Kragten-Heerdink et al., 2017; Winterdyk and Reichel, 2010, p. 9).

Both in the UK and internationally, however, there has been a notable increase...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: a different kind of trafficking
• 2 Extraordinary crimes involving fairly ordinary people and places
• 3 Unsophisticated networks and disorganised crime
• 4 The messy realities of grooming in a complex sex crime
• 5 Talking to the traffickers: denials, distortions and destructive dynamics
• 6 Investigation and prosecution: challenges, outcomes and opportunities
• 7 Conclusion: complexity, connectivity and social contagion
• Appendices
• Index